Sons of the Revolution

Can a ragtag civilian army defeat a dictator?

The rebel flag flying from the courthouse complex in Benghazi. One of the revolution’s great strengths has been Libyans’ hatred of Muammar Qaddafi, which has inspired thousands of them to risk their lives to remove him from power.Credit Photographs by Thomas Dworzak / MAGNUM

On the morning of March 12th, Osama ben Sadik, a volunteer ambulance driver, arrived for duty at the Red Crescent clinic in Brega, an oil-refinery town in eastern Libya. The uprising against Muammar Qaddafi had turned from a protest movement into a shooting war, and casualties were expected. But no one in Brega had a clear idea of what was happening on the battlefield, not even the few fighters fidgeting by a new barricade outside the refinery’s front gate. Six days earlier, Qaddafi’s armored columns had halted the rebels on their ill-planned, euphoric advance westward toward Tripoli. Bloodied and outgunned, the rebels, a leaderless rabble of university students, mechanics, shopkeepers, and Army reservists, had been falling back ever since. After a standoff on the coastal road that ran past Ras Lanuf, another oil-refinery town, eighty miles to the west, the rebels had buckled under heavy fire and made a panicked retreat. It seemed obvious that the small desert town of Brega would be the next target of Qaddafi’s forces.

At the clinic, most of the medical staff had evacuated after an ambulance was hit by a shell, killing one of their doctors and several nurses. A lone doctor remained, along with Osama, who was friendly, and spoke extraordinarily good English. A rangy man of forty-eight with warm brown eyes and an aquiline face that resembled a beardless Abraham Lincoln’s, he showed off his ambulance. To aid the war effort, he and some friends had adapted a Toyota Land Cruiser pickup into a mobile emergency-treatment center. The vehicle, painted white with a red crescent, was parked at the clinic entrance, where Osama was busily cleaning it.

When I asked Osama how he had learned English, he said, “I’m from Martinsville, Virginia.” He was Libyan, but his wife, Suzi, was half American. A onetime Libyan Arab Airlines engineer, Osama had, with Suzi, raised four children in Benghazi. But in the nineties, with Libya isolated by international sanctions because of Qaddafi’s refusal to hand over suspects in the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, Osama had struggled to make a living. In 2007, after the sanctions had been lifted, he moved with his family to Henry County, Virginia, near where Suzi’s mother lived. There, he found he could make money by exporting construction equipment to Benghazi, and he flew back and forth to supervise the business. With pride, Osama told me that he had become a U.S. citizen, and was now a member of Henry County’s volunteer fire department.

His wife and their two young daughters were in Virginia, he explained, but he and his two sons were in Libya, doing whatever they could for the revolution. While Osama was driving his improvised ambulance, his younger son, Yousef, a seventeen-year-old high-school student who was living in Benghazi with a relative, was taking part in the rallies held daily in front of the revolution’s headquarters, a beat-up courthouse on the city’s seafront promenade. Muhannad, his elder son, a twenty-one-year-old medical student, was fighting at the front. Osama’s description of Muhannad reminded me that a few days before, in Ras Lanuf, I had noticed a young Libyan-American fighter, fair-haired and blue-eyed. He was wearing a mujahideen-style pakul cap, and he waved and smiled at me from a jeep that was making its way to the front line. I asked Osama if his son had light hair and wore an Afghan cap, and he beamed: “Yes, that’s him! That’s my son.”

Osama lamented the inexperience of rebels like Muhannad and his friends. Qaddafi’s soldiers were largely veterans and mercenaries, backed up with significant artillery, most of it Soviet-era. The rebels, by contrast, had set up a base in Benghazi where Army veterans gave volunteers a brief training in how to load, clean, and fire a Kalashnikov; many fighters did not get even this rudimentary instruction. Osama said, “The boys at the front, some of them have never seen a gun before.” Qaddafi had appeared on TV and called the rebels “cockroaches,” swearing to hunt them down “house by house.” Osama concluded, “It’s no longer only about freedom now, this revolution; it’s about survival, and protecting one’s family.”

Earlier that morning, he told me, a middle-aged man from the distant town of Tobruk had driven up to the clinic and asked him how to get to Al Uqaylah, a small way station twenty-five miles down the road. Osama warned him that it lay in the path of Qaddafi’s advancing troops, but the man said that his safety was of no importance: he was going to Al Uqaylah to look for his son’s body. His son, a rebel volunteer, had gone off to fight at the front line. After not hearing from him for several days, he called his cell phone, and a stranger answered. When the father identified himself, the stranger told him, “No, I’m not your son. Fuck your son. Come and pick him up in Al Uqaylah. He has no head.”

Osama’s face contorted. He said, “The man wept and he asked me again, ‘Where is Al Uqaylah?’ ” Osama grabbed my arm and said, “My daughters, they’re only eight and twelve, and my wife—you can’t imagine how terrified and worried she is. I can’t let them see me cry.” He leaned into me and quietly sobbed.

Osama had flown from Virginia to Benghazi in mid-February, when the demonstrations against the authorities there suddenly turned violent. Following the successful revolts in Tunisia and Egypt, Libya’s own “day of rage” was scheduled for February 17th, but in Benghazi—the country’s second-largest city, and a longtime opposition stronghold—protests erupted early. Qaddafi dispatched his brother-in-law Abdullah Senussi, the country’s intelligence chief, and his son Saadi, a businessman, to subdue the city. But Senussi blundered: he arrested a human-rights lawyer named Fathi Terbil, who represented the families of an estimated twelve hundred political prisoners who had been massacred in Tripoli’s Abu Salim prison in 1996—an episode in which Senussi was personally implicated. Benghazi exploded in protests, and though Terbil was quickly freed, his release did nothing to stop their momentum.

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The authorities enlisted groups of seasoned fighters from Mali, Chad, Niger, and elsewhere; assisted by security forces, they beat and shot protesters, killing dozens. Watching from the United States, Osama worried about the safety of his sons, who were both in Benghazi. “Muhannad was already helping out the demonstrators,” Osama said. His son was strong-willed, he told me, adding, “I knew that he was capable of doing something crazy.”

On February 17th, Muhannad telephoned Osama. “He said to me, ‘Dad, I need your blessing, because fighting has started now, and they are killing my friends. I must join in.’ I asked him to wait. I said, ‘Let me give you my blessing to your face.’ ” He flew at once to Benghazi. “It was the last flight before they closed the airport.”

By the time Osama arrived, Benghazi’s uprising had become a full-scale insurrection, with hundreds of protesters rioting in front of the city’s infamous Katiba, the main security garrison. The violence had also spread to other cities throughout coastal Libya. On February 22nd, as the situation deteriorated, Qaddafi’s interior minister and longtime confidant Abdel Fattah Younes announced that he and his contingent of special-forces troops were switching sides. His forces helped take over the embattled Katiba, allowing the rioters to enter it, and, ultimately, to sack and burn it.

Within hours, rebels had set fire to Benghazi’s police stations and Army barracks and looted their arsenals. In the chaos, a thousand prisoners escaped from the city’s prison. The shabab, the youths who made up the hard core of the rebel fighters, torched the old Italianate town hall, where, in 1951, King Idris I had announced the nation’s independence. They also set fire to a villa owned by the city’s fugitive mayor, Huda Ben Amer, reviled for stepping forward during the public hanging of a young dissident in 1984 and tugging on the victim’s feet as he writhed on the rope. The rioters appropriated hundreds of new Chinese-made pickups from a stockyard and fitted them with heavy machine guns and anti-aircraft guns. After a week of protests, at least two hundred and thirty people had been killed in Benghazi, most of them by the security forces.

At first, Osama joined the crowds that gathered every day in front of the Benghazi courthouse. Inside, an ad-hoc alliance of lawyers, students, professors, and businesspeople was struggling to create a semblance of order by forming a leadership council. The council named a political-science professor as its education minister (though the schools were all closed) and a human-rights lawyer as its official spokesman. Outside the courthouse, a festive, anarchic atmosphere prevailed. Tents sprang up, with volunteers inside offering free food, coffee, and first aid; one hosted an exhibition of anti-Qaddafi cartoons, portraying him as a vampire, a madman, and a dog. A young Libyan set up a live Web stream on the courthouse roof, and a posse of students opened a media office inside a burned-out secret-police building.

By the end of February, rebels had assumed control of a series of coastal cities throughout the east. Soon after, military units operating out of Qaddafi’s tribal stronghold of Surt, halfway along the coast toward Tripoli, began advancing on the “liberated” territory. They struck first in Brega, on March 2nd, and were repulsed after a day of combat in which about a dozen civilian volunteers from Benghazi were killed. Osama decided that he needed to do more: “I could see that this is war now, and it is necessary to help.”

Since then, Osama had undergone a transformation. “Before I left Libya, there was nothing left for me here,” he said. “Now, when I see the sea, I smell a different air. I can see the sky, blue; I have never seen it so beautiful.” He said that his friends in Martinsville had appealed to him not to go to Libya. “I reminded them that Henry County was named after Patrick Henry—and remember what he said, ‘Give me liberty or give me death’? Well, that’s what we’re facing here. I’d like to see my country have some of the freedom that America has.” Osama’s eyes shone. “You know, my son Muhannad has showed me what it is to be a man. He woke me up.” On February 25th, a ship had evacuated American citizens to Malta. “I told him to go and join his mother in the States, but he said, ‘No, Dad, I must stay.’ He’s a great guy, a basketball player, you know. And a Boy Scout.”

Near Ras Lanuf, I had seen teen-agers with kerchiefs around their necks helping doctors rush wounded men into the overwhelmed emergency ward, but it didn’t occur to me that they might be actual Boy Scouts. Osama explained that Qaddafi had once banned the Scouts as an insidious Western influence but later allowed them to reëmerge. After the uprising, most police disappeared from the streets, and tens of thousands of migrant workers fled the country. Scouts stepped in to fill public-service jobs, helping at the hospitals, sorting out aid supplies, even directing traffic. It was Muhannad’s Scout membership that drew him into the uprising. “Remember the Scout oath?” Osama asked. “Duty to God and to your country, and to help others.”

As Qaddafi’s Army advanced, a number of Libyans told me that, if Benghazi fell, they would retreat to the Green Mountains, east of the city, to fight a guerrilla war. Like many of the rebel claims, these avowals sounded hollow. But the Green Mountains have long held an imaginative appeal to Libyans. An exquisitely verdant region in a country where grass and trees are rare, it borders the spectacular ruins of ancient Cyrene, a Greco-Roman temple city. The mountains also provided the backdrop to modern Libya’s bloody quest for nationhood—where the country’s greatest hero, Omar Mukhtar, led a protracted guerrilla war against the Italians, who in 1911 invaded Libya, resolving to seize it from the Ottomans and make it Italy’s “Fourth Shore.” Mukhtar and his band hid out in the canyons and caves of the Green Mountains for nearly twenty years before the Italians finally caught him, in 1931. By then, Mussolini’s troops had despoiled the countryside and imprisoned most of the people of eastern Libya; as many as a quarter of them died from disease and starvation. Public hangings and firing squads were common.

Some volunteers were given a rudimentary education in how to clean, load, and ﬁre a Kalashnikov; many were not. One said, “The boys at the front, some of them have never seen a gun before.”

Many Libyans were held in two large concentration camps: one in Suluq, a dusty town near Benghazi, and the other in the sands of Al Uqaylah. My friend Zaid, a thirty-two-year-old safety engineer turned revolutionary driver, lived in Suluq, and as we drove through Al Uqaylah one day he nodded toward the bleak white dunes and mentioned that his great-grandfather, his great-grandmother, and their six children had been interned there. Four of the eight died. “One of the ones that survived was my grandfather,” Zaid said. “But he died young, at around fifty, of kidney failure. They had to drink water from rain pools that formed on the desert. The water was full of minerals, and it gave them kidney stones.”

After a quick trial, Omar Mukhtar was hanged in Seluc, in front of twenty thousand of his imprisoned countrymen, whom the Italians forced to watch. It was the crowning moment of what would today be called a successful counterinsurgency campaign. It took Libya twenty years after Mukhtar’s death to become an independent nation. In the meantime, the Italians made it theirs, hammering the colonial possession of “Libya” out of the three regions of the old Ottoman wilayat: Cyrenaica, in the east, with Benghazi as its capital; Tripolitania, in the west, extending to the Tunisian border, with Tripoli as its capital; and Fezzan, the vast empty space to the south. The Italians colonized the territory with their soldiers and shopkeepers and poor farmers; they built roads and a railway, and erected statues, plazas, and cathedrals.

Italy’s dominance ended with the Second World War, which turned Libya into a proxy battleground, with the British and the Americans fighting the Italians and the Germans. These armies pursued each other along the same coastal road as today’s rebels and Qaddafi’s forces. After Italy’s defeat, in 1943, the British set up military administrations to govern Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, while the French ruled Fezzan. Tripoli and Benghazi remained as de-facto capitals of their separate regions.

In 1951, two years after Libya’s independence was approved by the newly formed United Nations, the country was reborn as a kingdom. Idris Sanusi I was a reluctant leader, an aging scion of an Islamist sect, the Sanusiyya, which had emerged during the nineteenth century, under Ottoman rule. Preaching a return to an austere, Islamic way of life, the Sanusiyyas were analogous to the Wahhabi sect of the Arabian peninsula. During his reign, Idris lived primarily in the east, and proclaimed the city of Bayda, east of Benghazi, the Libyan capital.

At the time of independence, Libya was one of the poorest nations on earth; its main exports were scrap metal from the war and esparto grass. Then oil was discovered, and in 1961 the country exported its first shipment of crude. In the next few years, the rudiments of a modern state began to emerge. Benghazi boasted a new university and hospitals, various foreign consulates—including one for the United States—an airport, a ferry port, and a sprawling sports complex.

In 1969, a coup was launched from Benghazi’s Army barracks, led by a twenty-seven-year-old captain, Muammar Qaddafi. Within a few years, Qaddafi, who began as a nationalist protégé of Gamal Abdel Nasser, had reinvented himself as a kind of Bedouin seer. Loosely combining elements of socialism and Islam, along with his own erratic ideas, he abolished private enterprise, expropriated foreign-owned property, and renamed the country the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriyah—the State of the Masses, in which he was not the President but the Brother Leader.

Other than Qaddafi, who replaced most of Libya’s modern history with his own cult of personality, there are precious few national heroes in Libya. Only Mukhtar has been permitted to remain, and he continues to provide a touchstone, in much the same way that the nineteenth-century poet and journalist José Martí has served revolutionary Cuba. There are Omar Mukhtar streets—Benghazi has one—and there is an Omar Mukhtar University, in Bayda; his face is on one of the banknotes. The graphic artists of the anti-Qaddafi revolution have appropriated Mukhtar as well, superimposing his gray-bearded image over the revived Libyan flag, on posters and decals and billboards.

Mukhtar’s son, Muhammed Omar, is still alive—he is ninety years old—and in late February I visited his house in Benghazi. A tall, handsome man, he was dressed in long black-and-white robes. When I asked him what it meant to be the son of Omar Mukhtar in the time of the new Libyan revolution, he said simply, “I am with the revolution.” Qaddafi had started out well, he said, but in recent years he had gone down the “wrong path.” Libya, he said, needed a change. “It’s over for Qaddafi. The only solution is for him to leave the country.”

In the early days of the uprising, I heard this wish expressed frequently by Libyans. “Qaddafi go” was a common refrain in Benghazi’s street demonstrations, and was ubiquitous as graffiti. Even if Libyans do manage to get rid of the dictator who has ruled them for forty-two years, the question of what Libya is and who its citizens are as a people will be a hugely difficult one to answer. It struck me in Benghazi that it wasn’t enough for Qaddafi to step down; if Libyans were to reimagine themselves as a nation and as a people, he needed to leave the land that he had made synonymous with himself.

In the course of four days in mid-March, Qaddafi’s troops made their way from the west toward the rebel stronghold of Benghazi, moving along the coastal highway through a string of towns: Ras Lanuf, Brega, and Ajdabiya. The rebels’ goal was clear—close down the road and hold off Qaddafi’s men—but the progress of combat was unpredictable. The front line moved constantly, placed not in strategic locations but wherever a handful of rebels decided to gather and fight. At Ras Lanuf, I found an unusually large group—hundreds of vehicles and several thousand rebels. Qaddafi’s forces did not generally attack before lunch, and so a couple of hundred fighters were holding an early-afternoon prayer session next to a roadside ammunition dump, led by a man in a seventies-style brown patent-leather jacket and slacks. In the middle of the service, we began to hear the thump of artillery. The leader continued the prayers, and though some men yelled at him to hurry up, most of them stayed kneeling before him. He told the fighters, “If you do not want to be martyred, leave your weapon behind and go, and no one will say anything to you.” By the time the men had finished praying, the shells were exploding much closer. The men streamed onto the road and went to their gun positions, shouting “Allahu akbar,” “God is great.” There was a tumult as fighters surged toward Qaddafi’s artillery and began firing back with rockets and guns. Then the shells came slamming around us and everyone rushed to escape.

At a pit stop in our retreat, a van pulled up next to my car. A smiling, portly fellow in his thirties climbed out and approached. He held up two crude-looking tin cans with fuses. They were filled with TNT. “They are fish bombs,” he said. He was a former fisherman and had used such explosive devices to catch his prey. But the bombs, which had to be used within throwing range, had little effect on Qaddafi’s tanks.

“So you’ve lost Ras Lanuf,” I said.

“No,” he said. “We are just retreating, not giving up our positions. Tomorrow, inshallah, we will return and reoccupy them.” At that moment, a friend of his loosed a pointless bullet from his AK-47. We all jumped, and the fisherman told him to stop. I asked if they were afraid, and he shook his head. “Just worried,” he said, smiling gamely. “If we were afraid, we wouldn’t come here.”

In war, of course, it is possible to be brave and afraid at once, and in Libya that was the norm. Earlier that day, a young man had been vaporized by an exploding rocket. Many of the rebels immediately panicked and fled, but some stayed, and, eventually, a number of others summoned their courage and trailed back. For many of these men and boys, conditioned by living under Qaddafi’s dictatorship, the mere act of appearing openly in public to shout their defiance represented an exorcism of fear. Standing their ground and fighting their ruler’s troops, though, was something else entirely.

The next morning, I headed out from Brega to see how far Qaddafi’s men had advanced. A rebel sentry with a blackened face told me to go only as far as Al Uqaylah, twenty-five miles to the west: “It’s not safe past there.” I found the front line about a mile beyond Al Uqaylah, a huddle of roadside snack shacks and trash heaps. In the middle of nowhere was a large, green-painted metal archway over the two-lane road, with barely a dozen battlewagons assembled there, camouflaged with smeared mud or spray-painted with slogans in the red, green, and black of the revolutionary flag. Since the fighting had erupted, the rebels had created front lines at these symbolic gateways. It was as if they needed a visual signpost to underscore their decision to face their enemy, and possibly to die, in that exact spot. No one had dug trenches or piled up sandbags to protect against the inevitable onslaught. A few dozen rebels stood watching, like firemen waiting for an alarm bell to go off, without any discernible plan about what they might do when it did.

Outside the gatehouse, a fighter began shouting, red-faced and spitting; he claimed to have heard that Qaddafi’s forces were cutting off children’s feet and then making them go on TV to say that the rebels had done it. It was an implausible charge, but, when everything that is routine about a society is violently altered, anything can seem possible. Libyans who until a few weeks earlier had coexisted peacefully, if resentfully, with their ruler now believed him capable of any evil.

More fighters showed up, and some onlookers, too, until there were perhaps forty vehicles pulled up in front of the gate—the entirety of the force defending Al Uqaylah. Then a screaming din came, as a jet fighter dived in out of the opaque sky and dropped a bomb about a hundred feet away, near the gate and a guard post next to it. There was a huge explosion, and rocks and dirt landed everywhere, but no one had been hurt. Everyone began getting in their cars and, amid panicked shouting, raced away. It seemed likely that there was no rebel front line anymore, and no real deterrent to Qaddafi’s forces.

The imminent collapse of the rebels in Libya had set off an international argument about whether the West should intercede. In Iraq and Bosnia and Herzegovina, Western nations had imposed a no-fly zone to protect civilians from air attacks, and debates were taking place in the United States, France, and the United Kingdom, as well as in the U.N., over whether to do the same in Libya. The day after Al Uqaylah fell, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived in Paris to meet with Nicolas Sarkozy, who was among the most vocal proponents of an intervention. Clinton, too, had argued in favor of a no-fly zone, despite protests from the Department of Defense. But in France she stopped short of endorsing military action, and a consensus seemed far off.

As the debate continued, Qaddafi’s forces moved along the coastal road toward Brega. The checkpoint outside town was a paltry thing, with just a few anti-aircraft guns, a lot of trash, and a small throng of worried-looking young rebels. On March 13th, Qaddafi’s men blew through it, with jet fighters dropping bombs and then laying down fire to clear the path. Within hours, the city had fallen, and the rebel force had been pushed back to Ajdabiya, the next town on the road to Benghazi. The week before, the rebels had had a theatrical swagger; dressed up like warriors and carrying ransacked arms, they gathered to shout and sing and fire their weapons into the air. Now they were sullen. Some were clearly irritated by the sight of Westerners, and yelled at reporters and photographers to “go away.” No fighter likes to be observed when he is losing.

It had dawned on the rebels that they were incapable of fighting Qaddafi by themselves; in less than a week, many had gone from disavowing any “foreign intervention” to begging for it. Despairing fighters came up to me and asked, “Where’s France? Where’s Obama?” In the United States and Europe, the debate hinged partly on the question of whether the rebellion would be coöpted by radical Islam. Qaddafi had long nurtured a mixture of anti-imperialist nationalism and Islamist xenophobia, and there was a certain amount of lingering anti-Americanism in the air, but without the visceral hatred that I have encountered in Pakistan and Afghanistan. One common myth held that Qaddafi himself was an Israeli agent, part of a conspiracy backed by the West. Graffiti around the Benghazi courthouse read “Qaddafi = Yahud.” I was told repeatedly that an Israeli woman had claimed on television that she was a cousin of Qaddafi; the footage had been rebroadcast on one of the Arabic satellite news channels, and “everyone” had seen it.

A brigade of former jihadi fighters—tough-looking, full-bearded older men—had come to the front from the eastern city of Derna. Their leader, Abdel Hakim al-Hasidi, had fought alongside Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda volunteers in Afghanistan, and some of his fighters were jihadi veterans of the war in Iraq. Another top commander, Abu Sufian bin Qumu, is a former Guantánamo detainee who also fought in Afghanistan.

When I raised the prospect of extremism with the secular, educated leaders of the Benghazi revolutionary council, they initially dismissed it as a vestige of Libya’s long isolation. But, when pressed, they acknowledged fears that, if the West didn’t come to their aid soon, radical Islamists could exploit the fragile situation. During one of the mass prayer sessions that were conducted every Friday outside the courthouse, I sat in an upstairs room with a Benghazi council member named Mustafa Gheriani, an amiable Libyan-American businessman in his fifties; his brother and his sister-in-law were also members of the council. We looked out of a window at the thousands of men and women gathered there, praying. Gheriani mused, “Will it be a democracy here, or will it be like what happened in Iran after the Green Movement rose up? The West didn’t open its arms and embrace them, and it’s been squelched. When there is education and prosperity, religion takes a secondary role, but when people are suppressed God comes to the forefront. And that’s dangerous.”

With Qaddafi’s soldiers closing on Ajdabiya, the town’s hospital was the place to go for news. When I arrived, on March 13th, I spotted Osama, standing next to the emergency entrance in a group of young fighters who wore grave expressions. Looking me in the eyes, he said, “Muhannad is dead.” Deep, soundless sobs wracked his body.

The previous day, Muhannad had showed up in Brega and spent the afternoon at the clinic. At around five o’clock, he and a pair of comrades headed off in the direction of Al Uqaylah. When Osama cautioned him, Muhannad reassured him that he’d be all right. Osama stayed the night in Brega but had to flee early that morning, when the bombing began. Muhannad did not come back.

A few hours before I arrived, fighters returning from the front had brought word that Muhannad had been shot. They told Osama that he had been in one of two vehicles that went toward Al Uqaylah, looking for the enemy. At twilight, some of the fighters decided that the venture was too risky, but Muhannad and two companions pushed on. In Bishr, near Al Uqaylah, they ran into an advance column of Qaddafi soldiers, who raced their battlewagons toward them, shooting as they came. One of Muhannad’s companions, a young man named Riad, had survived by running off into the desert; he had not returned to Ajdabiya, but he had told his story to the other fighters. Muhannad’s partner was gunned down nearby, he said, and then the Qaddafi soldiers shot Muhannad as he ran away. He saw the men hurling Muhannad’s body into their pickup, and he heard his friend scream.

At the hospital, several young men stood within earshot, looking shocked and grief-stricken. For the time being, Osama said, he would stay there, waiting for the body, which he hoped would be retrieved—even though Bishr was now in Qaddafi territory. If Muhannad’s body came in, he would take it to his brother’s house in Benghazi and mourn for three days, in the Libyan tradition. Then he would return to the front. “I am not going to let Muhannad’s death be in vain,” he said. “I’m not going back to America until this is over. I don’t care about anything anymore.”

One of the young men handed Osama a cell phone. He brightened momentarily as he listened and then repeated aloud what he was being told: Muhannad had been interviewed on Libyan state television. Osama turned to me. Could this mean that he had been taken captive and was being used by the regime for propaganda? As he spoke, young fighters came to him, and said, “Allahu akbar,” in urgent, soft voices. There was a flicker of hope in his eyes.

A moment later, another call came, and Osama’s face darkened again. The broadcast was more than a week old. Al Jazeera had interviewed Muhannad at the front in Ras Lanuf when the rebels briefly held it; he was singled out because he was fair-haired and half American and spoke good English. Libyan state TV rebroadcast his image and suggested that he was a foreign fighter, evidence for Qaddafi’s allegations that the opposition was a mob of pill-popping Al Qaeda extremists.

Osama sat down on the stoop of the hospital. The fighters sat around him. One of them, his nephew, told him that it was pointless to wait in Ajdabiya, that he should go to Benghazi to be with his other son, Yousef, who needed him. Osama listened uncomprehendingly. I asked if he had called his wife, and he looked at me with empty eyes and shook his head. Muhannad, he insisted, might still be alive and held prisoner; anything was possible as long as his body was not produced. He repeated, over and over, that he wouldn’t rest until he knew his son’s fate.

On March 15th, after a barrage of long-range shelling, Qaddafi’s troops swarmed into Ajdabiya, overwhelming it in less than an hour. It was the last town on the road to Benghazi, and, on television that night, senior Libyan officials jubilantly predicted the rebel capital’s imminent fall. Hours later, the rebels’ military spokesman held a hasty press conference, in which he insisted that Ajdabiya remained in rebel hands. “The current situation is good,” he said. “Army units tried to reënter the town, but our forces repulsed them.” The propaganda war was becoming intense, with both sides bluffing in the hope of gaining an advantage. State television would soon broadcast the “breaking news” that Qaddafi had forgiven Abdel Fattah Younes, the former interior minister who had defected, and given him back his old job. Footage was shown of the two men smiling together at a public gathering. The ruse persisted until someone pointed out that two of the officials shown at the event were now dead.

Still, the rebels’ claims about Ajdabiya were so transparently false, and their situation so obviously dire, that most of the foreign journalists in Benghazi prepared to evacuate for Tobruk, near the Egyptian border. The rebel capital had become a vulnerable place. A few days before, an Al Jazeera team was ambushed by gunmen—believed to be Qaddafi loyalists—and a Qatari cameraman died in the attack. The killing brought out a huge crowd of angry demonstrators in front of the courthouse, who bore the cameraman’s coffin aloft and demanded justice.

Benghazi was awash in rumors. To ward off a panicked exodus by the city’s eight hundred thousand inhabitants, the rebel council continued to make outlandish claims—there was much talk of “special forces operating behind enemy lines”—even as Qaddafi’s military began to probe the city’s outer defenses. Libyan jets bombed the Benghazi airstrip, outlying military barracks, and arms depots. Members of the council had spoken in past weeks about their desire for a bloodless, “white” revolution, without a wave of retributive arrests or executions. Such notions now seemed naïve. A hunt began for Qaddafi loyalists hiding in the city; Libyan friends told me of nightly roundups, and of gun battles in their neighborhoods. Then, on Thursday morning, a huge column of smoke appeared on the city’s horizons. The war was finally coming to Benghazi.

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On the night of March 17th, the U.N. Security Council was scheduled to vote on the “no-fly” resolution. That evening, Qaddafi made a strange televised address. In the tones of a wronged lover, he called the Benghazians his “sweet people” and entreated them to “come back” to him; he then vowed that those who did not would be shown “no mercy.” His son and heir apparent, Seif al-Islam, derided the resolution. “In forty-eight hours, it will be all over,” he sneered. “Whatever the decision, it will be too late.” Osama was outraged by his temerity. “How dare you speak to me like that!” he shouted, recalling the speech. “Who the fuck are you? Did I vote for you?”

At around midnight, thousands of people gathered to watch the U.N. vote on large screens set up outside the courthouse in Benghazi. There were great cheers as ten nations, including the sponsors of the bill—France, the U.S., the U.K., and Lebanon—voted in favor of the resolution. But, when five nations—China, Russia, Brazil, India, and Germany—abstained, the people in the square shouted angrily and threw scores of shoes at the screens, the ultimate insult in the Arab world. When it became clear that the resolution had passed, the city erupted in celebratory gunfire that went on nearly until dawn.

The next day, Qaddafi’s foreign minister, Moussa Koussa, announced a unilateral truce: “Libya has decided on an immediate ceasefire and the stoppage of all military operations.” Koussa, who would later flee to London, maintained that the government “takes great interest in protecting all civilians and offering them all necessary humanitarian aid, and respecting all human rights.” But neither the ceasefire nor the U.N. resolution changed anything on the battlefield; indeed, by that afternoon, Qaddafi’s troops had pressed the front line twenty miles closer to Benghazi. In the desert outside the city, I came to a roadblock manned by a large group of rebels. Shells were booming in the distance. An older fighter in a white turban and blue overalls introduced himself as Saleh ben Ali, forty-nine, a survivor of four years in Abu Salim prison, where the 1996 massacre had taken place. When I asked him what he had been accused of, he shrugged, and said, “For inviting someone to lunch whom they accused of being something.” Suddenly, the cry went up that Qaddafi’s forces were moving forward. The fighters trotted toward their vehicles, and we all scrambled back to Benghazi.

At sunset, there was a pleasant breeze on the corniche in front of the courthouse. A group of young girls in head scarves strolled by, singing revolutionary songs. Around the corner, at the city’s only functioning Internet café, a throng of twenty-somethings attended to their Facebook pages. Then, at around 9 P.M., the rebel radio station broadcast an urgent call for armed shabab to come quickly to Gimeenis, a suburb of Benghazi. Cars began racing around, and the few shops and cafés that remained open were hastily shuttered. The streets went completely quiet, except for a few barking dogs and the odd gunshot.

By morning, thousands of people were fleeing the city. Downtown, a jet roared back and forth, leaving behind white contrails. Suddenly, there was a flash, and the jet plummeted down in a blaze of light. It plunged behind a large building, and there was a tremendous explosion and a burst of smoke. I drove out to see where the jet had crashed and found fighters manning barricades all over downtown. In silent backstreets, small groups of terrified-looking rebel fighters and allied soldiers manned gun positions but could not tell me where the enemy was. Civilians with guns stood outside their houses, looking intently down streets.

On an expressway near the western edge of town, soldiers aimed guns from behind guardrails. Qaddafi’s men were over there, they said, pointing toward a residential neighborhood about two miles from the city center. An armored column of soldiers had come forward from Ajdabiya during the night; they attacked just before dawn, first taking the university, on the western outskirts of town, and then pressing on into the city. Friends told me that they were trapped in their houses as tanks fought outside. Some of the troops invaded an affluent neighborhood, Tabalino, where, residents said, armed Qaddafi supporters entered the fray as if on a prearranged signal. Finally, along the road near the university, Qaddafi’s forces were stopped by an army of shabab, local men, and Islamist fighters. There was a tremendous firefight, and several dozen people were killed before the Qaddafi column withdrew to the city’s outskirts. As for the downed plane, word had begun to circulate that it was the rebels’ only remaining fighter, shot down by mistake. The pilot had ejected, but too late to save himself.

A few hours after the fighting stopped, I noticed columns of smoke coming from the area where Qaddafi’s force was said to be. French bombers had made the first air strike of the no-fly resolution. It would prove to be a turning point in the war, but most people in Benghazi were too distracted by the threat of Qaddafi’s troops to celebrate. On newscasts, the French claimed to have destroyed a couple of armored vehicles outside the city. “Just two? What about the rest?” everyone asked.

By late afternoon, the area around the university was teeming with civilian men and boys who had come to see what had happened. There were incinerated vehicles and torn-up roadside shade trees and bullet-pocked buildings. At the on-ramp to the expressway leading to the city center was a burnt-out tank, with people crawling in and out of its turret hatch. Where shells had hit apartment buildings, gaping holes showed their interiors. A young, shocked-looking man wandered around, telling his story to anyone who would listen. He had been abducted by the advancing Qaddafi forces the evening before on the road from Benghazi to Ajdabiya; they had bound and beaten him—his hands and face were swollen and bloodied—and brought him to Benghazi, where he escaped during the fighting.

At Jala Hospital, downtown, some fifty bodies—fighters and civilians—were piled up in the morgue. In a room at the entrance with a caged window, the bodies of a dozen Qaddafi fighters lay on the concrete floor; among them were the dirty, bullet-riddled corpses of several dark-skinned young men—suspected mercenaries. A crowd of curious men stared down at them and made harsh remarks.

A guard took me to a secure back room where rebel intelligence agents were interrogating a pair of wounded enemy soldiers. When they were done, he showed me in. One man was lying on his back, with an I.V. drip attached to his arm. He had been shot six times, he told me, wincing. He was a soldier from Sabha, a town in Libya’s interior where Qaddafi has many loyalists. After the uprising, he had been taken to a special military camp near Surt, where a force was assembled to attack Benghazi. The soldiers were told that their mission was to rescue the city from Al Qaeda extremists and drug addicts. He told me this with a straight face but watched my eyes closely as he spoke.

Rebels greet Osama ben Sadik, who returned from America to help their cause.

The man in the other cot moved in his sleep, and his blanket fell away, exposing his back. It was covered with scores of ugly puncture wounds, as if from a shrapnel blast. He seemed to be drugged; his eyes were closed, and he groaned softly. The guard shook him roughly and demanded he speak to me. I said to let him sleep. Afterward, I asked the guard why he had treated the two prisoners differently. He said that the soldier from Sabha was an ignorant man who had believed he was doing his duty. The second one, however, was a mercenary, a Libyan who had taken money to kill his fellow-citizens. The guard’s lip curled with disgust.

That night, the air strikes continued, as the U.S. military launched more than a hundred Tomahawk missiles, wiping out the armored column poised on Benghazi’s outskirts. The city was electric with the prospect of victory. Everyone said proudly that the road to Ajdabiya was a charnel ground, and I drove out to see it. Beginning just beyond the university, near a vast new Chinese-built apartment complex, the roadside was strewn with dozens of tanks and other military vehicles that had been scorched into blackened trash. There were bodies, shredded and burnt, and all kinds of military refuse lying around. Within hours, war tourists were everywhere, posing for camera-phone pictures in front of the destroyed vehicles or on top of tanks holding up their fingers in triumphal “V” signs. I was struck by this victory display from people who had been bystanders in the politics of their own land—and now in the war that would determine its future. They were the civilian equivalent of the shabab, with their gunfire, their boastful chants, and their manifest need to feel that they were in charge of their own fate.

In the coming weeks, the fighting settled into a pattern. Qaddafi’s men would retreat under NATO bombardment; the rebels would stream into the cleared territory until they caught up, and then engage the soldiers in hasty and often fatal attacks. On March 23rd, I travelled to the front line near Ajdabiya. A cool breeze had lifted sand off the red desert floor, blurring the horizon. Ahead, near a large bend in the road, there was a commotion of fighters and vehicles. A young man in a military uniform explained that the coalition had bombed the Qaddafi positions about an hour earlier, and the rebels, encouraged, charged up the road, only to be fired on by artillery and tanks. Eight died, and the rest fell back. He pointed to the nearby bend: “Everything from there on is exposed to their fire.”

Another young man, wearing a padded parka and an Australian-style bush hat, introduced himself as Muhammad Saleh, and pointed to a bayonet stuck in his belt. “This is my weapon,” he said, smiling. He was a mechanic, aged twenty-two. His brother Issam, nineteen, had just been killed on the road, he told me; another brother, Fateh, fourteen, had died during the February protests. “I am the only son left for my parents,” he said. He lived with them in Benghazi, where he had an auto-parts shop.

At that moment, shells began thudding a few hundred yards away. Cautiously, we continued talking for a minute, but then suddenly there was a flurry of explosions around us, and everyone threw themselves on the ground. We scrambled for cover; Saleh kept a protective hand on me as we ran.

When the danger had passed, I asked if he wanted to return to Benghazi and tell his parents about his brother’s death. His eyes filled with tears. He had already sent someone to inform them, he said, and to tell them not to weep. He shook his head and said dumbly, “I have their permission to be here.”

On the night of Friday, March 25th, after a long bombardment by coalition warplanes, Qaddafi’s forces fled Ajdabiya. The next morning, the city was free, and the rebels poured back, along with people returning to their homes and carloads of gawkers. As the shabab celebrated, shooting guns off and setting fire to tanks, I went to the hospital, and found Osama ben Sadik there with his ambulance crew. He seemed buoyed with hope. “I have a couple of stories coming through, indirectly through people, that my son is still alive,” he said. “He is refusing to come on Libyan television to say what they want him to say. What they want him to say, you know, is that he is an American spy, working for Al Qaeda, and I know my son—he will never, never say anything like that.”

He had seen a car following his ambulance in the city, he said, and it had returned to lurk outside his home at night, driving away only after his watchman fired a gun at it. He speculated that the surveillance was organized by Qaddafi’s people. “Probably they wanted to capture me or my son Yousef to pressure Muhannad to speak,” he said.

I asked Osama how he had learned of Muhannad’s capture, and he said that a relative heard the news from an officer in the revolutionary forces. He had gone to see the officer, at a checkpoint on the Ajdabiya road, but reached him on March 18th, the same evening that Qaddafi’s forces pushed into Benghazi. “He was very confused,” Osama said. “But he was confused, I think, because he was hearing that Qaddafi’s Army was coming to Benghazi. So the checkpoint where I found him was in an emergency.”

More promising news had come a few days earlier, when it emerged that Muhannad had a friend’s cell phone with him when he vanished. The friend’s mother called it, trying to get in touch with her son, and said afterward that somebody answered the phone and said, “Listen, your son is with us.” Osama reasoned that since Muhannad had the phone, the person who answered must have been talking about him. The call was made six days after his disappearance.

During the tense run-up to the attack on Benghazi, Osama and Yousef had moved in with his cousin Ali, in Hawari, a rural suburb of Benghazi. Ali and his neighbors barricaded their street so that no strangers could enter. Osama’s decision to move turned out to be wise. His own house was only a couple of miles from the university, and during the battle there artillery shells killed three of his neighbors.

A few days earlier, Osama had dispatched Yousef to the U.S. and rejoined the ambulance crew at a provisional clinic near the new front line outside Ajdabiya. He was going to continue to assist the rebels. Most likely, he said, they would move on to Brega now, and then he would follow as the front moved forward. And he would find Muhannad.

Osama had called his wife, Suzi, but had not told her that he believed their son was alive. “I didn’t want to say that to her. I said, ‘Keep your hopes up, but don’t be excited, be prepared just in case.’ ” Smiling, he told me, “I mean, now it’s ninety-nine per cent that he was captured alive. What they’ve done with him, that’s what we don’t know.”

Three weeks into the uprising, Iman Bugaighis, a dentistry professor and a prominent member of Benghazi’s revolutionary council, described the prospect of life without Qaddafi as like stepping into a void: it was terrifying, and might prove fatal, but it was urgently necessary. “It’s either us or him,” she said. “We know that we’re outnumbered, and we know he’s capable of anything. There is a huge vacuum, because we have no institutions and no experience of working in institutions. The people here are from different backgrounds, different minds; the only thing uniting us is our desire to change this. For us, it’s over. He made us ashamed of ourselves; he took away our flag, our history. We know that we can be bombed tomorrow. But who cares?” She waved a hand at the run-down, shuttered city: “What is this, life?”

From the outset of the revolution, one of its great strengths has been Libyans’ hatred of Qaddafi, which has inspired thousands of them to risk their lives to remove him from power. One of its great weaknesses has been the vacuum that Bugaighis described—not only of institutions but also of credible leaders. The Libyan rebel coalition could well break up into rival factions. In addition to the shabab, there are former jihadis; there are also the educated professionals of the Benghazi city council, like Iman and her sister Salwa, a lawyer. There are former members of the Qaddafi regime: a cobbled-together “transitional national council” is led by Mustafa Abdel Jalil, a respected former judge who served as Qaddafi’s justice minister, and the movement’s “prime minister,” Mahmoud Jibril, served as an economic adviser to Seif al-Islam. The council’s most pressing concern is the conduct of the war, but even military leadership has been disputed. Abdel Fattah Younes, Qaddafi’s former interior minister, became the effective head of the rebel army only a few weeks after he relinquished control of Libya’s special forces and secret police. I heard rebel fighters describe him with marked distaste, and a few expressed suspicions that he was secretly working for Qaddafi.

Mustafa Gheriani, the Libyan-American council member, acknowledged these frictions but suggested that the council members were working to resolve them. “Look, Younes has a lot of loyalists, because he’s been around a long time, especially in the special forces,” he said. “It was very difficult to have him accepted by the young people. We had a lot of footwork to do, believe me. But Younes did not have blood on his hands. How did the Katiba fall? Yes, our kids attacked it with bulldozers and backhoes, but how did it actually fall? When Younes brought his forces and attacked it. So we have to give that to him. And, anyway, who else is there?”

A smattering of émigrés—exiled dissidents, technocrats, and politicians—have come back to help the revolution. But many have been away for years, and remain unknown to most Libyans. Gheriani compared revolutionary Libya’s dilemma to the one that faced the Allied powers as they tried to rebuild postwar Germany: “They kept the Nazi infrastructure in place. That was what got Germany working again.” He threw up his hands. “The military here is an institution, and we need to keep it working.”

When I asked an influential Benghazi businessman, Sami Bubtaina, why the revolution had not produced a leader, he said, “Everything was so fast! By the second week, the shabab were in Ras Lanuf.” Bubtaina, who is in his fifties, told me that the leaders of his generation were terrorized and coöpted by the regime. In the mid-seventies, dissidents in Benghazi were hanged on the university grounds, with students and faculty forced to attend, and on the steps of the old Italian cathedral. There had been an economic opening in the past few years, he said, but the promise of political reform was a sham. “In the last three or four years, we’ve had satellite television and the Internet, but we still couldn’t communicate our feelings,” he said. “If we did anything to communicate with the political opposition, we’d go to jail, or be disappeared.”

It was his children’s generation that had seen an opportunity. “The young people watched what happened in Egypt and Tunisia on the Internet, and they said, ‘Why can’t we do the same here?’ But there was no plan for a war, or even a real plan to overthrow Qaddafi. There was no leadership; just some people who went out and threw things at the police, and then the police used weapons to kill the kids. So this started when the first martyr came to the hospital.”

“Qaddafi is done,” Gheriani told me. “We’ve gone beyond whether he’s going to stay or go. It’s about how to stop the bloodshed and figuring out how quick it will be before Libya can join the rest of the world.”

Late on the night of March 26th, in Benghazi, I was awakened by a colleague, the photographer Nicole Tung, who had an urgent message from Osama: Muhannad’s body had been found. The previous afternoon, after Qaddafi’s troops had fled Ajdabiya, a group of Muhannad’s friends had driven to Bishr to look for him and had found his corpse by the roadside. Unable to get through to Osama’s cell phone, they returned to Benghazi with Muhannad’s body and buried him. Tung said that Osama was grief-stricken but relieved to know his son’s fate, and had talked about him for hours.

In the morning, I rushed over to Ali’s house and found him and several young men sitting in the mourning tent—a long, low structure made out of colorfully patterned cloth, with gray plastic chairs inside. Osama was on his way. Before he arrived, Ali told me what he knew. Several men—including one of Ali’s brothers and Muhannad’s friend Riad, the only survivor of the attack—were in the group that went to Bishr. When they arrived, they discovered that Muhannad’s body had lain for two weeks at the side of the road, a few hundred yards out of town. A shepherd, who grazed his flock in that area, showed them where two other bodies had been, on the other side of the road. He’d buried them, he said, but was unable to cross the road to Muhannad, because of a nearby checkpoint manned by Qaddafi’s soldiers. Ali said, “Whenever he tried to go where Muhannad was, those people started shooting at him.”

Muhannad’s friends had been surprised to find his body intact, with no sign of decay. “There was no smell or anything,” Ali exclaimed. “There was a bullet in the forehead. That was all they could see.” Other than the wound, he said, “the body was as if he had died just a few hours ago.” According to some Islamic traditions, the bodies of martyrs are inviolable, able to persist for decades without rigor or decay. Ali said, “We believe that this is something from God.”

When Osama arrived, his face was clearer, without the anguish of uncertainty, and I told him that he looked better. He said, distractedly, “At least I know now that he rests at peace. Now the hard part is how to tell his mother.” Osama had not yet called his wife to tell her that Muhannad’s body had been found. Qaddafi’s regime had cut off cell-phone service in eastern Libya, so I offered Osama my satellite phone, but he wouldn’t take it. “I want to talk to her but . . . maybe not today.”

That afternoon, I went with Osama to Bishr to look for the spot where Muhannad’s body had been found. He wanted to assure himself that his son’s unspoiled condition was not evidence that Qaddafi’s men had held him captive and executed him only recently. He was accompanied by a man named Safrian al-Atrash, the uncle of another of the dead youths, who was hoping to recover his nephew’s body.

It was nearly twilight when we arrived. As darkness fell, we drove around sandy back lanes, speaking to local farmers. A couple of young men confirmed for Osama the shepherd’s account. They had seen two bodies on one side of the road, and one—a fair-haired man—on the other. There were six bodies in another spot by the roadside. Every day, they drove past them, but, except for the two that the shepherd had reached, Qaddafi’s men refused to let them honor the dead with burial.

The two men came with us, and we drove back and forth in the darkness where they thought the graves might lie. We stopped, and Osama and Safrian got out and walked forward in the sand, poking at mounds that our headlights illuminated. Eventually, we encountered a couple of local men who said they had seen some rebels removing the two corpses in body bags the day before, and we gave up searching.

Osama was elated to find that Muhannad had not suffered. “The big question has been answered, and I am very satisfied,” he said, smiling. The local people’s information had meshed. Safrian added, “They knew his face, and . . . even after ten days, staying in the sun, his face had not changed!”

“Yes, I am very happy,” Osama said. “I tell you. This is a miracle. We believe—Muslims and Christians—that there is Heaven and Hell, and if you sacrifice yourself for a good deed then God will reward you. In our religion, people believe that if you are pure it will be rewarded. His friends who found him said his body was like that”—he took my hand and made me feel the softness of his palm—“soft as tissue, with no fermentation. And they were overwhelmed because that meant he had done what he did for God.” Osama’s voice had become deep and emphatic, as if he were in a state of rapture. “Now, now I can talk to the mother and tell her the news!” He laughed and exclaimed, “God left him here. Imagine! For fourteen days he was lying where he was, because God wanted to reward me and his mother, to say to us, ‘Don’t you worry about it. I have put those evil people there to protect him, so that his friends can come and bury him near your house.’ ” Osama was laughing wildly, and I didn’t want to look at his face. He gazed up into the night sky and said, “Ah, thank you, God. Thank you, God.” ♦

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